Also I think I’ve written a really brilliant continuity. It had better be for it seems to be a last life line that Hollywood has thrown me. It is a strong life line - to write as I please upon a piece of my own and if I can make a reputation out here (one of those brilliant Hollywood reputations which endure all of two months sometimes) now will be the crucial time.
Have a cynical letter from Scottie about the Princeton prom. Thank God I didn’t let her start to go at sixteen or she would be an old jade by now. Tell me something of your life there - how you like your old friends, your mother’s health, etc., and what you think you might do this summer during the hottest part. I should have said in my letter that if you want to read those stories upon which I think you might make a new approach to writing some of your own, order Best Russian Stories, Modern Library edition, from Scribners and they will charge it to me.
Next week I’ll be able to send you what I think is a permanent address for me for the summer - a small apartment in the heart of the city. Next fall if the cough is still active I may have to move again to some dry inland atmosphere.
Love to all of you and especially yourself.
Dearest love.
Scott
5521Amestoy Avenue
Encino,
California May 18, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
It’s hard to explain about the Saturday Evening Post matter. It isn’t that I haven’t tried, but the trouble with them goes back to the time of Lorimer’s retirement in 1935.I wrote them three stories that year and sent them about three others which they didn’t like. The last story they bought they published last in the issue and my friend, Adelaide Neil on the staff, implied to me that they didn’t want to pay that big price for stories unless they could use them in the beginning of the issue. Well, that was the time of my two-year sickness, T.B., the shoulder, etc., and you were at a most crucial point and I was foolishly trying to take care of Scottie and for one reason or another I lost the knack of writing the particular kind of stories they wanted.
As you should know from your own attempts, high-priced commercial writing for the magazines is a very definite trick. The rather special things that I brought to it, the intelligence and the good writing and even the radicalism all appealed to old Lorimer who had been a writer himself and liked style. The man who runs the magazine now is an up-and-coming young Republican who gives not a damn about literature and who pub. lishes almost nothing except escape stories about the brave fron tiersmen, etc., or fishing, or football captains - nothing that would even faintly shock or disturb the reactionary bourgeois. Well I simply can’t do it and, as I say, I’ve tried not once but twenty times.
As soon as I feel I am writing to a cheap specification my pen freezes and my talent vanishes over the hill, and I honestly don’t blame them for not taking the things that I’ve offered to them from time to time in the past three or four years. An explanation of their new attitude is that you no longer have a chance of selling a story with an unhappy ending (in the old days many of mine did have unhappy endings - if you remember). In fact the standard of writing from the best movies, like Rebecca, is, believe it or not, much higher at present than that in the commercial magazines such as Colliers and the Post.
Thank you for your letter. California is a monotonous climate and already I am tired of the flat, scentless tone of the summer. It is fun to be working on something I like and maybe in another month I will get the promised bonus on it and be able to pay last year’s income tax and raise our standard of living a little.
Love to you all and dearest love to you.
Scott
P.S. I am sending you the copy of the article you sent me about Scottie. You said something about giving it to Mrs McKinney.
1401 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California June 7, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
The Harvard Summer School idea seemed better for Scottie than her going to Virginia. You remember your old idea that people ought to be born on the shores of the North Sea and only in later life drift south toward the Mediterranean in softness? Now all the Montague Normans, Lady Willerts, Guinnesses, Vallam-brosas etc., who loafed with us in the South of France through many summers seem to have dug themselves into an awful pit. I want Scottie to be hardy and keen and able to fight her own battles and Virginia didn’t seem to be the right note - however charming.
I’ll be sending you a semi-permanent address any day now.
Dearest love.
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California
June 14, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
At the moment everything is rather tentative. Scottie is coming South about the 20th and after that wants to go to summer school at Harvard. If I can possibly afford it I want her to go. She wants an education and has recently shown that she has a right to it. You will find her very mature and well-informed. My feeling is that we are in for a ten-year war and that perhaps one more year at Vassar is all she will have - which is one reason why the summer school appeals to me. If I can manage that for a month, then perhaps I can manage the seashore for you in August - by which time you will have had a good deal of Montgomery weather. A lot depends on whether my producer is going to continue immediately with ‘Babylon Revisited’ - or whether any other picture job turns up. Things are naturally shot to hell here with everybody running around in circles yet continuing to turn out two-million-dollar tripe like All This and Heaven Too.
Twenty years ago This Side of Paradise was a best seller and we Were settled in Westport. Ten years ago Paris was having almost its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling badly for us much too early. The world has certainly caught up in the last four weeks. I hope the atmosphere in Montgomery is tranquil and not too full of war talk.
Love to all of you.
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California July 6, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
I enjoyed reading the interview given out by our learned Scottie. I’m glad to know she spends her time thinking about strikes, relief and starvation while feeling no slightest jealousy of the girls with silver foxes who choose to recline on country club porches. It shows that we have hatched a worthy egg and I do not doubt that someday, like George Washington, she will ‘raise that standard to which all good men can repair.’
Seriously, I never heard such a bunch of hokum in my life as she sold that newspaper reporter but I’m glad she has one quality which I have found almost as valuable as positive original’ty, viz.: she can make the most of what she has read and heard - make a few paragraphs from Marx, John Stuart Mill, and The New Republic go further than most people can do with years of economic study. That is one way to grow learned, first pretend to be - then have to live up to it.
She has just shown her keenness in another way by taking me for $100.00 more advance money for the summer school than I had expected to pay, leaving me with a cash balance of $11.00 at date. Don’t bawl her out for this. Leave